LINGUISTIC NORMATIVISM IN DIGITAL SOCIAL NETWORKING: AN ANALYSIS OF LÍNGUA PORTUGUESA FANPAGE ON THE FACEBOOK

ABSTRACT

Discursive practices brought by digital social networking and mediated by sites like Facebook receive a large membership of young people. On the other hand, they suffer considerable stigma by regulators of the Portuguese language uses. Writing in digital settings becomes a sharp auto exposure mechanism for users, resulting in judgments about "right" and "wrong" usages of language. In this sense, a certain amount of fan pages of Facebook, whose posts are "liked", commented and eventually "shared" in the users "timelines", have constituted themselves as informal learning environments for language uses regarded as best or correct, in parallel to the schooling institutions. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the meaning of these discursive practices in the virtual environment: what are this normativism faces and what imaginary it establishes or reproduces on the Portuguese language and its use, especially those that occur in the interactions in the very social networks? This research was based on contemporary studies on digital social networking (RECUERO, 2009), on the one hand, and on the sociolinguistic notions of standard (FARACO, 2008), variation and linguistic discrimination (BAGNO, 2007, 2011, 2013), on the other. Its main objective is to investigate facets of linguistic normativism conveyed through fan pages like Língua Portuguesa in the Facebook, in its relation to the writing practices in the digital environment. The study focuses, in an exploratory and qualitative way, on postings made in that fan page, performing the analysis of both text and image that constitute the post and of the user's comments.

Keywords:
Linguistic normativism; linguistic prejudice; fan pages